


Take a Year

by MissIzzy



Category: X-Men (Movieverse)
Genre: Gen, Post - X-Men: The Last Stand (2006)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2006-09-07
Updated: 2015-01-10
Packaged: 2017-12-13 10:31:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 20,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/823273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissIzzy/pseuds/MissIzzy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rumors of Scott Summers' death have been greatly exaggerated, but he needs some time away.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Scott's Choice

**Author's Note:**

> As this was started after X3, it ignores all prequels & other franchise installments. Seeing as there are timeline differences in the movies of when people were born and whatnot, I have taken the liberty of tweaking Pietro and Wanda's family line to make them Magneto's grandchildren instead of his children.

For days Scott Summers had stumbled through the woods, eyes screwed shut, as scrunched up as his heart, and in almost as much agony.

He wished he’d just let Jean kill him. He thought she would have, if he hadn’t somehow managed to pull away. Which had broken her hold over his eyes, and she had cried out, and he had turned and run. He still didn’t know whether he had killed her or not.

No, he knew he had killed her. Because somewhere in him, he  _knew_  that Jean Grey truly was gone, in a way he hadn’t know before that fateful encounter.

His glasses were long gone, and without them he had no idea where he was going, nor did he care. He pushed through bushes and branches and tangling vines; they scratched him and tore at him and bumped and bruised him. He listened to the sound of his feet treading over the rough ground until he wanted to scream, but he didn’t dare.

He wasn’t sure who he was afraid of, but he knew there was someone out there, someone to be terrified of. Someone who felt like Jean, but couldn’t be Jean, because he knew that Jean was gone, and he must have killed her.

So when he first heard the footsteps, he began hastily moving away from them. He bumped into more trees, then his foot hit a rock too fast and he went flying. He very nearly opened his eyes again, before he face was smushed into the dirt. He felt a thornbush jab into his upper arm, and for a fleeting moment wondered if he could just scratch his eyes out. Then he heard the footsteps getting closer, coming for him, and frantically scrambled to his feet, only to feel them give way again.

He heard a woman’s voice say something(A woman! It was a woman who was after him, likeJeanbutcouldn’tbeJeanbecauseJeanwasgoneandhehadkilledher), then next thing he knew a pair of strong arms had pulled him up and were holding him fast, even though he was sure the footsteps hadn’t been right on top of him yet. But they were male arms, and it was a male voice which said, “Calm down. We won’t hurt you.”

More footsteps, and a woman’s voice said, “Careful. We don’t know what he can do, but no human has that level of energy, and not many mutants either.”

Her footsteps got closer(womanlikeJeanbutnotJeanbecauseJeanwasdeadandhehadkilledher), and Scott yelled and opened his eyes at last, then twisted himself around to blast his captor. He felt the arms releasing him, heard both the man and the woman shout, and then suddenly his sight was filled with red light of a hue not his own.

“Please,” said the woman again. “We want to help you. If you’re a mutant, you’re amoung friends.”

This woman wasn’t like Jean, Scott was coming to realize. There was a separate voice still calling to him, and that meant she had to be someone different. He closed his eyes again.

“Well, you’ve managed to blast a few trees down, haven’t you?” the woman commented.

“I need ruby quartz,” Scott said, some automatic response kicking in.

“Oh dear, that’s a problem. Pietro, do you have any idea-”

“I can go look, for what it might be worth. Who knows, there might be a nature museum nearby. At any rate, we need to get more food. I’ll bet he hasn’t eaten in days.”

Indeed Scott hadn’t, not that he’d felt at all hungry or thirsty. Which was something he should perhaps have wondered about. Come to think of it, why hadn’t he felt tired or fallen asleep either?

“I’ll be back in an hour or so,” Scott heard Pietro say, and then there was a minute or so of silence.

“Well? Are you going?” he asked in confusion.

“He’s gone,” the woman informed him. “He has superspeed. Sit down?” She took his arm and guided him onto what felt like a fallen log. “My name’s Wanda Maximoff. Pietro’s my brother. Our friends call us Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch.”

“I’m Scott Summers. My friends...” but here he drifted off. The X-Men seemed so far away now. The rift that had been growing ever since Jean’s death(or what they thought was her death, but now shereallywasdeadandhemusthavekilledher) had after the encounter with Jean turned into an impossibly wide divide, because now he didn’t think he could stand setting foot in the mansion again at all.

“Scott Summers,” he heard Wanda say softly. “I think I’ve heard that name before...”

He left it to her to remember by herself if she could, if only because he still didn't know how to finish that sentence. “How long have you two been out here?” Scott asked. If these two were homeless, and willing to fight for a peaceful world, they might go to Xavier as his replacements.

“Well...” It sounded like he had hit an uncomfortable topic. “On our own, a day or two.”

“On your own?”

One second of silence, as Wanda got her bearings. “You’ve heard of Magneto?”

“All too much...”

“The truth is, we followed him out here, but we deserted him. He sounded right on some things, and I don’t at all blame him for not trusting the cure, but some of the things he said...‘Humanity is the disease, and we are the cure...’” That was extreme even for Magneto, Scott thought. No wonder he’d scared some people away. Though what was this about a “cure”?

“I mean, he talks about how we’re in danger from genocide, but then I wonder why if he thinks genocide is such a bad thing; he’s advocating it! So when we all began moving towards...oh, I don’t want to tell you, but it doesn’t matter, they’ve probably all come and gone from there by now anyway...”

“It’s all right. You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to.” The mentor role, he thought, might just be ironic at the moment, especially because she didn’t quite sound like a teenager. She might even be older than him; he couldn’t tell at the moment.

“Thanks, so at any rate when they left the woods, we bolted. It was easy enough, thanks to Pietro’s little ability.”

“I think Magneto would have left you go,” Scott informed her. “He doesn’t keep followers against their will. Or at least he didn’t at one time.”

“Now he doesn’t have to,” replied Wanda. “His other followers would have done it for him if we hadn’t been so quick.”

“Sounds like a number of them.”

“You have no idea...” So Magneto was increasing his numbers, and if he was losing a few people, he probably felt he could afford to.

“Wait a minute!” yelled Wanda. “Cyclops! That’s where I’ve heard your name before! You’re one of those X-Men, aren’t you?”

“I....was. I’m not sure if I still am.”

“What? What happened to you? I’ve told our story. You won’t arrest us, will you?”

It was easier to address the last question first. “On what grounds? You two haven’t actually done anything, have you? Unless Pietro’s out there stealing.” Utter silence, and Scott had the feeling that Pietro was doing exactly that.

“But really,” Wanda finally said, her voice betraying a new nervousness, “I wouldn’t expect to find one of the X-Men out here lost and without his equipment.”

“I...” Scott groped for the words, but couldn’t force them past his mouth. “I can’t tell you. I’m sorry.”

He wasn’t even aware of how violently he was trembling until she put her arm around him and whispered in his ear, “It’s okay. You don’t have to say anything. Though I would think you’ve lost someone. I remember losing my mother...not a person many mutants grieve for that way, but my father was a mutant, so she knew what we were from the beginning, and had accepted it.”

“She must have been a good woman,” Scott commented. “Neither of you sound too young, so if your father was a mutant, she must have been able to accept something that wasn’t even explainable at the time.”

“We’re both 24.”

“Not much younger than me, then.” Yet much younger emotionally, he imagined. He had aged perhaps ten years since losing Jean(except she hadn’t died yet, she was only dead now, because he had killed her, oh Jean...)

“Shh, don’t cry.” Her arms around him tightened.

“I can’t cry. I wish I could.” Maybe it would make him feel better. It might have been worth a shot.

“Well, if you really want to...I could make it happen. Even if you don’t have tear ducts, though that might be harder.”

“I have tear ducts...what exactly can you do?” he asked, thinking he really should have asked this question earlier.

“I alter the laws of probability, basically. Makes me capable of a number of things. I don’t know what’s going on with your eyes, but I’m pretty sure that whatever it is, I’ll be able to override it.”

“How can you tell that? And I thought you did something with energy.”

“Not  _per se_ , though I can alter its probability, same as with everything else. I can just sense yours as a side-effect. You need to be able to sense energy fields and such to operate the way I do.”

That was hardly impossible, Scott knew. Magneto had the ability to sense anything made of metal within a certain range, and the Professor automatically knew if anyone came within ten meters of him even when his shields were up. Even Jean had(had had but now shewasdeadandhehadkilledher) a vague sense of matter density in her local area which she had tried to describe to him once, but hadn’t been able to put into words.

Jean, Jean, everything came back to Jean.

Maybe she sensed something coming out of him, because she said, “I think you do need to cry. Can I let you?”

“I don’t know if I could even then," he replied, his voice almost ragged, "but go ahead and try.”

Her fingers settled at the corners of his eyes, her hands on his forehead, and he felt the heat behind them recede(like it had with Jean but shewasdeadandhehadkilledheritallcamebacktoJean). It was so constant a presence he almost never noticed it anymore, but now he noted that it wasn’t gone entirely.

Scott cautiously opened his eyes, noting that his vision was still slightly red-tinted, in fact slightly more so then when Jean had done this(right before hehadkilledheritallcamebacktoJean). Wanda Maximoff was a pretty young woman with wavy hair, probably brown, possibly black; he couldn’t tell for sure. He was sure that her shirt and jacket were red though. Living up to her other name, it seemed.

“They tell me I look like my grandmother,” Wanda commented. “She died when I was four.”

“Was she a mutant?”

“No, but we think her first husband-my grandfather-was. Don’t know for sure, because she’d never talk about him.”

“But why?” It didn’t sound like her grandmother had had any problem with her father, after all.

“Beats me. Maybe it had nothing to do with his being a mutant. Hell, maybe he wasn’t a mutant at all.”

 

####  **An hour or so later**

Scott hadn’t cried, in the end. The fear that Wanda might not be able to control his eyes quite enough stopped him, or possibly he just couldn’t bring himself to cry in front of someone he didn’t really know. Eventually they gave up when Wanda grew tired of restraining his powers, and he shut his eyes again. As they sat there, she told him more about her father.

“I suppose it was relatively easy for noone to be afraid of him. He was a Class One if there ever was one. Had the most harmless, most charming little ability. He’d just twirl his hand around, and it would reproduce any sound he’d ever heard. Like I said earlier, our grandmother died when we were four, but we still grew up hearing her voice. He used to play to us the lullabies she sung to him as a kid. She had such a voice...at least some Gipsy blood, I know, though they never told us the details.

He was the quietest man ever too. He let his hand do all the talking. The kind of person, I think, that even if he had been shooting fire from his eyes, or had that kind of demeanor that the red-haired woman that Magneto always had next to him, you still could never have been afraid of-”

“Red-haired woman?” Scott interrupted, hope and terror warring for control of his suddenly hammering heart. But that couldn’t have been Jean, because Jean was dead, he  _knew_  Jean was dead, and he must have killed her, and even if he hadn’t, what on Earth would she have been doing with Magneto?

“Yes, he had her with him when we joined him. She didn’t say much, but stood there screaming ‘I am very powerful and very, very dangerous.’ I wasn’t the only one who could sense it.”

“Her name! Do you happen to know her name?” But it couldn’t have been Jean, it couldn’t-

“What’s up with you? No, I didn’t catch it.”

Scott decided to assume it hadn’t been Jean. It was too unlikely. There was no logical explanation for her ending up in that position. Plenty of women in the world, and even powerful mutant women, had red hair. Or at least he was sure that there were other powerful mutant women with red hair. Logic would dictate that there were. Besides, he knew that Jean was dead.

The sudden sound of footsteps near them startled Scott, but then he heard Pietro’s voice, saying, “I’m back.”

“Have you brought food?” Wanda asked him.

“Not only that, I’ve also brought news.” Scott heard a light thud as Pietro sat down near them. “Magneto’s vanished. They think he was exposed to the cure.”

“Oh, wow,” said Wanda. “I actually feet sorry for him, if that’s true.”

“That’s the second time you’ve mentioned this ‘cure,’” said Scott. “Could you tell me what it is?”

“You have been out here a while, haven’t you? Someone found a formula that turns mutants into non-mutants. That’s the cure.”

“You’re kidding!”

“I wish she was!” Pietro snapped at him. “Has it occurred to you how this could be abused?”

It was quick to occur to Scott exactly how it could be abused. From there, figuring out what Magneto had been up to was easy. “So Magneto went to destroy it.”

“Along with Alcatrez Island, where it was developed and stored. But it seems the X-Men showed up and did him in. Then that redhead that Magneto had about him went crazy, but one of them was able to kill her too. A number of our former Brotherhood colleagues were definitely exposed, though, and many of them are unaccounted for.”

Scott was assuming that the redhead was not Jean(who was dead anyway, heknewthatandhemusthavekilledher), so he ignored the mention of her. Instead he considered all of the implications. He felt a twinge of pity for Magneto, but more relief. But even so, both he and those other mutants exposed to the cure might still be dangerous, especially because they would be angrier than ever.

He still didn’t want to go back to the mansion, but he wasn’t a former X-Man yet. So under the circumstances, he should find out more information, and if it was information the X-Men didn’t have, he should find an internet café and email the Professor. Or he should at least find an internet café, email the Professor, and explain that he wasn’t coming back, if he truly wasn’t coming back.

“Can you take us into a city?” he asked Pietro. “I want to see what happened for myself.”

 

####  **Later**

The red-haired woman had been Jean.

Even with Wanda holding his power down the brightness of the bar’s TV had been almost painful, but he'd been able to see the CNN footage, and he never would've failed to recognize her. It still didn’t make sense entirely, because he still  _knew_  that Jean Grey had been gone from the time he’d turned and run, but perhaps she was only gone metaphorically, as in she’d somehow gone mad. Because her behavior in the footage made it likely that she had indeed gone mad. What had happened to her in that lake? Would he ever know?

Either way, she was dead again anyway, and this time Logan had killed her. It was pretty obvious he really hadn’t wanted too, that she'd been so far gone there had genuinely been no choice. Even so, watching him carry her dead body past the cameras, growling at them in bleeped out language to go away, was more than Scott could take. He screwed his eyes back shut again and said, “I’ve seen enough. Let’s go.”

“Sure you don’t want a drink?” he heard Pietro ask.

“Yes.”

“Well, I’m getting one anyway. I’ll meet you two outside.”

Wanda guided him out of the bar. He heard the noise of it fade behind him as he felt the sun on his face. “So what do you want to do now?” she asked.

He’d been considering his options already, and now he was more certain than ever that he couldn’t go back to Xavier's. Already being in the mansion had tormented him with the memory of Jean, and now he knew he wouldn’t be able to stand anywhere in those halls without seeing her dead in Logan’s arms. The CNN report had included a clip of Ororo telling a reporter that they were going to try to keep it open despite the Professor’s death(which hadn’t even sunk in yet, maybe after Jean’s death finally did...), and he wished her and the others luck, but he couldn’t be a part of it anymore.

But then, what was the use of running? Jean could haunt him anywhere, now that even his powers could remind him of her, of what she’d looked like just before she’d gone mad and was lost and was dead, and even if he hadn’t directly killed her, was his presence what finally pushed her past the edge? Had he destroyed her in an even worse way than simply killing her would have been? He knew just what would happen to him now. He might try a fresh start, but it all came back to Jean, and sooner or later, he’d be reduced to his current state again.

It built slowly, this kind of thing. For nearly a week after Jean’s death(whattheythoughtwasJean’sdeathbutshehadonlydiedlaterafterhehaddestroyedherinanevenworseway) he’d behaved as if nothing had happened at all. Perhaps he’d wanted to sleep a little more, but that was all. Then he started delaying going downstairs for meals because, he told himself, he didn’t like the pity in everyone’s eyes. This had translated to staying in his room more and more, and it was only so long that he could lie to himself and say that it was only to avoid everyone else. It was because he plain didn’t want to leave, didn’t want to go out and have to keep going, be reminded that Jean wasn’t there with him, even though he hardly forgot it by acting the way he was. Once the pretense dropped, he’d gone straight from denial to despair, losing all desire to do anything at all from think about Jean and wallow.

His only chance of getting past this might be to discard  _everything._

“Where are they distributing the cure?” he asked at last.

As he expected, he response was a horrified, “You’re kidding me.” Her hands landed on his forehead in a clear demand for him to look at her.

He gave into it, staring into her shocked and even angry face. “I can’t be Cyclops anymore,” he tried to explain. “I have go away, and I have to leave everything behind, including my powers.”

She showed no understanding; her eyes(blue, he thought) were hard, judgmental. They reminded Scott of someone’s, though he couldn’t remember whose at the moment. “Besides,” he added, “I can’t spend my life walking around with my eyes screwed shut, or with you walking around with me with your hands constantly on my forehead.”

“We can go to Xavier’s and get your glasses. That’s not a problem at all.”

“Sounds like a good idea to me,” said Pietro, appearing with Scott’s line of sight, having apparently just come out of the bar and missed the first part of the conversation. “Tell the truth, I’ve been thinking about that. Obviously Wanda and I’ll have to talk about it a little further, but we’ve got to go somewhere and I think we could give the X-Men a try, maybe.”

“You think so?” Wanda turned her attention towards him, sounding game enough.

“It’s either that or return to our lives as vagrants and possibly wait until another wingnut is elected president and comes after us. We can’t follow Magneto anymore, we agreed on that, but I want to fight somewhere.”

“As X-Men, you’ll have to protect humans as well,” Scott reminded him. “Knowing Magneto, he isn’t finished yet.”

“That’s true,” said Wanda, “but maybe it won’t be quite so bad. It’s worth a look. So are you coming with us or not?” She returned her focus to him. “I’ve heard a bit about your reputation; this isn’t like you, to run away.”

He really should explain, Scott knew. She and her brother had been very kind to him, he wasn’t going to get to the cure without their aid, and he couldn’t ask them to help with something they objected to without at least trying to make them see why he needed what he needed. But he thought he could explain now. Being certain of Jean’s fate had somehow removed a barrier in talking about her.

“I think I may need that drink after all,” he said. “And all three of us are going to have to sit down.”

He explained sitting in the corner back in the bar, drinking some beer without really tasting it, his eyes closed again, and his stomach experiencing weird sensations, possibly at having to function for the first time in days, his two companions listening warily. It was much easier to tell the story of what had happened to Jean then, especially once he got started and words followed words.

When he finished, Wanda first said, “Well, now that you’ve told me that, I have an idea that could explain a few things. I think she must have made some sort of mental imprint on your brain, making you thus aware of her mental state. So your brain figured out on its own that Jean Grey was gone, perhaps because if she’d been in your mind before, it might recognize her, and didn’t there, because she’d gone crazy or something, possibly from trauma inflicted during her time in the lake. The isolation would be bad enough...mind you, this is a pretty wild theory.”

“And my lack of hunger or fatigue?”

“You’ve been living off her energy, which you absorbed. That I’m now sure of. Though I’ve noticed it’s wearing off. You’ll probably need to eat something and sleep again soon.”

She placed her hands on his forehead; he opened his eyes to look into her face, now very grave, but much more sympathetic. “I understand. In fact, I’ve been there myself, and I’m not just talking about my parents either anymore, but...” She drifted off. Scott knew better than to press, or to protest. “I don’t approve, but if you really feel that you can’t live as a mutant anymore, we’ll take to you to the center, and I’ll stay with you until you’re injected, if you want.”


	2. Just Another Mutant Lost

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Taking the cure and what Scott did after.

Pietro went straight to Xavier’s. Wanda and Scott waved him off, Wanda promising to join him later. Neither blamed him for bailing out of the trip they were taking.

Wanda kept her fingers pressed tightly to either side of Scott’s eyes as they walked through the protestors. She couldn’t force him to keep his eyes open, of course, but she certainly made no offer to remove her hands. Nor would he have been happy if she had let up. He didn’t really want this to be easy. It wasn’t that he felt he  _shouldn’t_  be doing this, exactly, but he was aware that, at the very least, he wasn’t setting the best example. It was proper that he be reminded of that.

He joined the long line behind a woman with pouches of flesh that protruded from her elbows and hung down her arms. She looked at him, at the crowd, at the line, and commented, “Welcome to the mutant abortion line, both of you. What’s your poison?”

Scott wanted to tell her not to call their mutations that, even in jest. But it seemed kind of hypocritical to do so at the moment.

“I’m just here with him,” Wanda said hastily. “He needs me to restrain his eyes.”

“Have you been doing that all your lives?”

“Not quite. I had a special pair of glasses, but...” he drifted off.

“But?” the woman repeated dubiously.

“He’s misplaced them at the moment,” Wanda explained lightly.

“That’s why you’re taking the cure? Because you lost your glasses? Don’t you think you should try looking for them instead?”

“There are more reasons than that,” Scott told her. “It’s a long story.”

“Talk away,” replied the woman. “In case you haven’t noticed, we’re going to be here a while.”

She had an undeniable point there. But Scott wasn’t sure if it was an especially good idea to mention his affiliation with the X-Men at the moment. During the on-spot interview that Ororo had submitted to at Alcatraz, she had made her disapproval of both the cure and those who took it clear. “I would never attempt to stop a mutant from taking this so-called ‘cure,’” she had said, “or attempt to destroy it, but I think it’s in most cases unnecessary, even cowardly.” He only hoped she wasn’t speaking that way to mutants like Rogue, who might want the cure for reasons that had nothing to do with being accepted.

Come to think of it, he was one such mutant himself at the moment. It was still strange to think of himself that way. He wasn’t about to assume he was some unique special case, especially when anyone in his situation probably wouldn’t make their emotional state known to too many strangers, but even so, he didn’t think his motives could be that common, in the end.

The woman was still staring at him expectantly. Scott heard Wanda sigh and snap, “Will you please stop staring? Someone like you ought to know very well how rude it is.”

“Chill out!” said the woman incredulously, and turned away.

The line inched forward in a manner rather ominous, if one thought about it, and most of the mutants in the line had the time to as well. Because every time they moved forward, it was with the awareness that it was because another mutant had just been injected with the cure, opening up the operation room for the next. Or at least it seemed that way to Scott.

“Aren’t your arms getting tired?” he asked Wanda after some time.

“No,” she replied crossly, and he didn’t ask again.

The line moved, the protestors yelled, the woman in front of them yelled back, but of course she couldn’t be heard over them. Even Scott couldn’t make out her words, when he was standing next to her. It didn’t seem to be just his imagination that they were louder nearer to the building entrance.

Even inside the building their voices traveled through the walls, and woman sighed and said, “Don’t they ever get bored out there?”

“Probably not,” replied Wanda icily, before Scott could say anything.

“Oh, if you’re so self-righteous,” the woman sneered, “why are you helping him? You could take him away from here if you wanted to. Or is it just that his is the only justifiable case of taking the cure in the world?”

“I’ve chosen not to judge him. At least he’s not judging them.”

The voices died down eventually, when they got further down the corridor. At some point Scott let his eyes close, and Wanda let her arms relax. She kept her hold on him though, wrapping her right arm around his left to steer him. He heard the woman laugh and ask, “Why didn’t you do that earlier?” Neither responded.

“We’re reaching the end of the line.” As she said this, Wanda moved her hands back and Scott opened his eyes and saw she was right. They were now in sight of a metal door, through which a doctor was ushering a nervous-looking mutant. “If you’re not absolutely sure you want to do this, you really should turn back now.”

“I’m sure. I need to start my life over.”

As Scott said this, he knew it was true, but now that things were imminent, he found himself feeling regret, and much more surprisingly, fear. To walk in the world without the power behind his eyes suddenly felt like a daunting prospect.

When they came for the woman in front of him, he suddenly found himself asking, “Wait. What’s your name?”

She looked at him funny, then said, “Pam.” She then hurried through the door before he could give her his own name.

Less then five minutes more of staring at that door, reminding himself that yes, he was sure he had to do this, that yes, he was going to miss his power, but that didn’t change the fact that keeping it would only bring him down to where he’d been, it opened again. “Next,” called an indifferent voice.

“Last chance,” said Wanda.

“I have to do this.”

As they passed through the door, the woman who had called them in placed her hand on Wanda’s arm to stop them and asked, “Are you family to this man?”

“Yes,” said Wanda, as Scott said, “No.”

“His mutation sometimes interferes with his mental functions,” Wanda told the woman hastily, while glaring at Scott. Scott personally didn’t see the need for the lie, but he doubted he’d be believed if he tried to override it now. It probably played straight to the prejudices of these people.

“A non-mutant sibling to a mutant? That’s unusual.” Neither gave any response to that, though Scott could have pointed out several examples he knew of it happening.

He closed his eyes again as they helped him into the operating chair. It didn’t bring him relief from the heavy knowledge of what was about to happen; he could still hear the rattle of instruments and the donning of rubber gloves, and his sleeve was rolled up and his arm swabbed.

Yet for all that, it was a good thing his eyes were closed, because he knew if he had known exactly when the syringe would connect with his vein, he probably would never have let it. But as it was, he only knew as he felt it go in, and it was, at last, too late.

He felt the needle withdraw, a hand slap a bandage on. Then he felt a chilly sensation around his eyes, sharp at first, then the feeling of something  _changing_ in his eye sockets, something draining away. Very cautiously, fighting ten years of reflexes, Scott Summers opened his eyes.

It was more colorful than he remembered. Wanda had done a pretty good job of reducing the red but now he could see colors he hadn’t even remembered existed. The sky outside the window was blue. Blue, and ridiculously bright. After a moment or so he had to close his eyes again against it.

“Is he all right?” He heard the male doctor ask Wanda. “Do you think it might not have worked?”

“If it hadn’t worked,” said Scott, fighting back annoyance at being talked over, “you’d have a smoking hole in place of that window. I just need a moment to get used to it.”

“Well, if you’re done here, we do have other patients to see to, sir.”

“Hey, what do you think you’re doing?” On hearing Wanda’s frightened snap, Scott hastily rose and whirled around-then next thing he knew, Wanda had scooped him up and they were crashing through the window. He thought he heard someone yell, “Ah, not again!”

They were hovering up above the crowds, and it seemed Wanda had changed things so that it was now very probable that the wind would catch them, or gravity would suddenly stop working, or something like that would happen to prevent them from falling to their deaths. “You’re reckless,” he observed to his companion.

“Pietro’s even more so,” she retorted, but at least they were headed to the ground now, the wind lightly carrying them down. “One of them grabbed me; and he was holding a syringe. Who knows that he wouldn’t have injected me.”

“That’s ridiculous; the lawsuits alone would keep him from doing that!” If they wanted to join the X-Men, Scott found himself thinking, they had no learn not to have hysterics and break other people's windows on reckless assumptions of absurdities. Even if it had sounded like that was something that happened sometimes in that particular operating room.

“Say what you will.” They glided over several tree tops before landing neatly on the pavement of a street several blocks away from the facility. “Have you thought about what you’re going to do with yourself, now that you’re no longer an X-Man?”

“I think I’m going to do what I’ve actually spent most of my adult life doing: teaching. I have the degree in Math, and the certification for New York State, which I think is accepted in some other states too.”

“Well don’t try to teach in Alabama; they’re strongly discouraged from hiring mutants there-some sort of law makes it harder, though I don’t know about ex-mutants.”

Scott had heard about that, and had already decided he wasn’t going to try to teach there. So one state down, 49 to go.

The two of them had agreed to meet Pietro at a nearby park, and Wanda had already identified the nearest subway station. As she led him towards it, Scott found his eyes drawn to the vivid colors surrounding him. The blue of the sky. The white of the clouds. The green of the grass. The green and brown of the trees. The tan of the pavement. He walked past a house with rose bushes and had to stop himself from staring at the flowers. And the cars. He had never in his life noticed that cars were so many different colors. Each was a block of silver or blue or white or yellow or some other color, and he wondered what it would be like to see them all on the highway, little multicolored rectangles streaming over the dark road.

All too soon, they reached the subway station, which had bright beautiful colors on the sign that identified it, and what lines it was tied to, but it saddened Scott to have to go below, into the darkness. As they stepped onto the escalator he looked back, over the heads of the people getting on behind them, trying to keep the blue and white and green within his sight for as long as possible. He craned his neck until he nearly tripped into Wanda. She seized his head and forced it forward.

For a moment he panicked at his inability to see; the light seemed inefficient, and he wondered how anyone could navigate. Then he remembered that normal eyes adapted to darker environments if one just waited a bit.

The subway system had its own share of colors, mostly on the walls, mostly in advertisements. Down on the platform, waiting for the train to arrive, he stared continually at one of them, a poster for some local play with pastel rainbows in its design. In the past, he didn’t think he would have been able to discern the colors from each other. Now it was easy.

Wanda herself, he now observed, was indeed dressed all in red, and her hair was a dark brown. Her skin was peach, and her eyes were blue, and once again Scott thought they reminded him of someone, though not by their color; he was pretty sure it was of someone he’d only met after his mutation had manifested.

Pietro was waiting in the park which had green grass and tan walkways and a couple of white marble sculptures and brown patches of dirt in which blue and yellow and red flowers grew on green stems. He had on a brown jacket and dark blue jeans and white sneakers. Physically he was same colors as his sister: dark brown hair, peach skin, blue eyes. He was holding two beige suitcases.

“Ms. Monroe packed some things for you,” he said to Scott, holding the suitcases out. Scott took them, noting their weight. “She wrote you a letter too.” He handed that to Scott also.

“And that’s it,” said Wanda. She shifted awkwardly. “This is goodbye, and I don’t suppose we’ll see you again.”

“You never know,” said Scott, though he had to admit at the moment it didn’t seem likely. “If for any reason you ever have the need to seek me out, feel free.”

“Thank you,” said Wanda. “I’ll remember that.” She hugged him, and to his surprise he could feel her shaking.

Then she pulled away, and Pietro took his hand and shook it. “Good luck,” he said.

“And to you both,” answered Scott. Then he took a hold of Wanda and they were off, so quick there was only a split second’s blur in front of Scott and then it was if they’d never been there.

He dragged the suitcases to the nearest bench, sat down, and opened up the letter. He read:

_Dear Scott,_

_I will not pretend I was not shocked, and deeply disappointed, to hear of your choice to not only leave us, but to turn your back on your very nature by taking the cure. I don’t understand it, and I don’t think I ever will. Nor am I sure I can even forgive you. Nonetheless, I wish you well in whatever you choose to do with yourself now, and if you ever need help, or even want to help is some way, you need only contact us. As a parting gift, I enclose some money for you to live off of while you look for a job, as well as some information you may find useful._

_Sincerely,  
Ororo_

He couldn’t have expected any better, he knew. It wasn’t the first time Ororo had formed an opinion and then simply refused to entertain any contrary views. It was something that she’d even written to him at all.

There was indeed a check enclosed, and also a piece of paper in which Scott found notes about all fifty states: what they required, what their anti-discrimination policies were, and her general impression of each. On the top she had written  _The Northeast is probably your best bet._

####  **About a Month Later**

 

Six interviews so far. One he’d actually managed to flub; he’d never had to do this kind of thing before. One he was fairly certain he’d only been called in for because someone had been unprofessionally curious when they’d seen Xavier’s on his curriculum vitae. One had consisted of him sitting there and being blasted with a philosophical rant about how the X-Men, contrary to what one might think, were in fact proof that mutants were a menace to society. The interviewer had wanted Scott to denounce them; when Scott had refused, he’d known that one wouldn’t get anywhere.

The other three he thought had actually gone pretty well. He’d managed to establish himself as someone who actually had taught from the time he’d been nineteen and knew how to do it, and skirt around the reasons for his leaving his previous posting. But none of them has resulted in anything more. He had heard some of the students who had come to Xavier’s at an older age talk about how it had been perpetaully hard to get a job for well over a decade now; it was something he’d been shielded from at Xavier’s, and now something he wished he’d paid attention to.

The seventh brought him back to New York, and to the city, to a high school in Elmhurst with a heavily Chinese student population, where the rudimentary Chinese he’d had to teach himself once was a bigger asset than it had any right to be, and he as he stood there waiting, he contemplated that he liked the look of the place, but it was a little too close to home for his emotional comfort. He knew the Professor and Magneto had even lived together elsewhere in the city when they’d been younger, back when they’d thought themselves the world’s only mutants.

But such thoughts were dispelled when he first saw Richard Connors. He was a big, burly man with a jovial way of moving, who looked odd when his grey suit and black hair and dark brown shoes and white socks were so impeccably crisp. His eyes were the intense kind of green that might have given Scott a headache back when the colour would have combined with his ocular filters to confuse his brain.

“A real pleasure, Mr. Summers.” His hand was big, but surprisingly soft. “I must say, I’ve been curious about you.”

“I hope that’s not why you asked me here,” said Scott with a smile, but he already had the feeling it wasn’t. There was something about the man that made him relaxed, perhaps more so than he had been since before that day over a month ago(had it really not been more? It felt like ten years ago) he’d first driven out in response to Jean’s disembodied call.

“No, but getting to meet you is an added perk. Come in, sit down.” His office was disorderly, but not at all dirty. A computer hummed in the background. The desk was steel grey, Mr. Connor’s chair red mahogany. The chair Scott sat down in was brown, with extremely minor damages. The whole place felt in use and alive.

“So,” said Mr. Connors, “tell me about teaching at Xavier’s. I understand the faculty of the school has always been very small, and ironically only started to increase in number after the first Headmaster’s death and your own resignation.” This was true; Scott had given up trying to not keep track of events at the school, and so he knew the Maximoff siblings had indeed now settled there, Hank and Logan were both now more involved in the school than they had been, and, perhaps most significantly, Rogue, Jubilee, Bobby Drake, Piotr Rasputin, and Kitty Pryde had all decided to stay on after graduation, the first permanent additions to the staff since Scott himself had joined their number. “Something tells me it’s a little different than teaching in a school such as this one.”

“It didn’t seem that hard at the time, actually,” said Scott. “Remember our student body was very small.” He’d gotten the impression it had grown in the past month; mutant children now knowing it was a haven causing them to seek it out, but he wasn’t following that closely. “The bigger challenge was less the student:teacher ratio than the age differences between the students; most of them had gone through puberty, of course, but we even had a couple of younger children whose powers had manifested early, so I taught everything from basic arithmatic to college-level calculus. And yes, we had to be ready to teach a range of subjects, though when we, as the first generation of Professor Xavier’s pupils, began working on our degrees and certificates, we delibrately chose different general subjects.” He didn’t mention that he’d pretty much been handed the Math track after Mystique(and Toad) had left with Magneto.

Though he was also starting to think there wasn’t much that wouldn’t go over well with this guy. His smile was different from the five smiles he has seen so far(the man who had disparaged him about the X-Men hadn’t bothered smiling); there was not only a genuineness to it, but a serious warmth. For some reason he just liked Scott. “So you were pretty much there setting the school up, weren’t you?”

“Yeah, we were.” It seemed a bigger accomplishment in retrospect than it had felt like at the time, day to day. “Though I think the Professor-Professor Xavier, I mean, took on more than his fair share. My main focus was developing the math curriculum.”

More talk about his curriculum, comparisons to what was taught at each age in this school; it wasn’t a dissimilar setup. They’d managed to slip into talk about standardized tests, which neither of them approved of, when they were distracted by what sounded like an explosion come from so close by the windows rattled.

A lifetime’s training as a X-Man caused Scott to jump up and raise his hand to his eyes, before he remembered they were no longer a weapon. “What was that?” he asked.

Mr. Connors gently gestured him back down. “I don’t know, but we’ve been hearing them every now and then from the new office building you probably saw while coming in here. I don’t think it’s a real explosion; we’ve never seen or smelled anything like a fire, after all, but I do wish they wouldn’t make those sounds; terribly distracting for the students. Though then again, I suppose at Xavier’s the students are used to oddities.”

His laugh was warm rather than malicious, and Scott knew he meant no harm in the remark, but he was still displeased. “We did everything we could,” he told the man, “to make as peaceful and uninterrupted a learning environment as possible. The school and the X-Men’s base were cleanly divided from each other within the mansion, and I can proudly say that none of them ever heard an explosion during class hours.”

“I meant no offense, Mr. Summers. And I certainly know better than to insult Xavier’s standards of learning; I’ve met a couple of your alumni here in New York.”

“Did you know they were mutants?” Scott managed to smile.

“I knew one of them was. The other wasn’t out at the time. Of course, now...”

Of course, now, since Stryker and Magneto’s double-whammy on the world, mutants everywhere were out. Except that reminded Scott of Jean again.  _Don’t succumb,_  he told himself.  _Lead the conversation away from it._  “How does that influence the kids here, though? Now that they know when their peers are mutants?”

“It has caused some difficulties, I’m afraid,” said Mr. Connors. “We’ve had more problems with bullying since the Mind Explosion. Of course a number of students took the cure, but some their parents wouldn’t let them, and others just didn’t want to, and tell the truth I sometimes think it’s made things worse for those who remain mutants. I’ve known a number of students to transfer to somewhere where they’re not known, but now that means transfer students of all kinds are looked upon with suspicion. It’s not an easy situation, Mr. Summers.”

“And how would my presence influence it?” This was a question that had already been nagging Scott, and this speech had brought it to the forefront. “A mutant’s who’s taken the cure? There’s no hope in concealing who I am, I think; one buff on mutant politics hears my name and that’s it. Will it put pressure on those who remain mutants? I don’t want it to.”

“That, I would think,” said Mr. Connors, “would depend on how you present yourself. Done right, I think you’re being in the classroom could do both mutant and former mutant students a world of good, the latter especially, of course, since, they’d not immune from bullying either, but both groups. The question, of course, is if you’re up to that challenge.”

“I am,” said Scott without a second’s hesitation. “Whatever I can do. That’s always been my job. Not just to teach math, but to teach acceptance, both of oneself and others, and how to adapt and live in the world. At Xavier’s it had to be, but it would have been anyway.”

“Very well spoken, Mr. Summers,” said Mr. Connors, and Scott was left with a very strong feeling that he had the job. The interview went on a little longer, he learned more about the school itself, and he made sure to ask the questions he’d prepared beforehand because he knew he was supposed to ask questions at the end of the interview, but as he walked out of the office and down the stairs, stepping out of the way of pieces of used gum and nearly slipping on the last half-broken step, he found himself looking at the building as his new operating base, which he would soon become as familiar with as he’d been with the twists and turns of the great mansion he’d lived his adult life in before then.

Outside it was with a similar mindset that he took in the city street. It was a place mostly of old brown apartment buildings, with trees planted on the sidewalks and a line of shops across the way: drugstore, food, Chinese food, Kosher food, dry cleaners.

He had noticed the office building, if only because it definitely stood out. Placed in front of the bus stop, it was five stories high, and was pristine and metallic. Looking at it again, he noticed for the first time that the fifth floor had only two windows, one on each end of the building, though of course there might have been more windows in the back and the sides.

The proper thing to do, he was aware, was to just go to the bus stop, wait for the bus, and forget about it. He wasn’t an X-Man anymore, after all; it was no longer his job to meddle with affairs that involved explosive sounds. But on the other hand, since it was so close to the school, it could end up being his business very easily, and anyway, he couldn’t change who was that way so easily; as a human being, he felt as if there was possibly something dangerous threatening high school students, well, he ought to do something about it.

He would take the briefest look, he told himself. Go in, look at the directory, and see if there were any suspicious-sounding organizations listed as renting the space, especially the fifth floor.

It really would be trouble to do more, he knew as soon as he stepped in. His entrance immediately attracted the attention of a security guard seated at the front desk, who asked if he could help him in a very polite but underlyingly dangerous voice that hinted there would be very bad consequences if he attempted to linger very long in the building without stating his purpose.

“Just want to see if it’s here first,” Scott bluffed. “I’m starting to think I got on the wrong bus.” So with that excuse he was able to study the directory, and the first thing he saw, below listings of various companies with suite numbers placed before their names was:  _Fifth Floor: Hellfire Club._

That guard was really starting to stare, so he said, “No, wrong building,” and turned and walked out. He could feel the man’s eyes cutting into his back, though, and he was even glad the bus arrived quick.

He was aware he ought to know more about the Hellfire Club than he did. He knew that they were a group of mutants, that the Professor had been keeping an eye on them before his death, and that he thought they might be dangerous, but had not been entirely certain just what their purpose was. Ororo would probably know. He’d have to email her as soon as he got back to the hotel.

And then, with his face leaning against the bus window, looking at the names of the streets and the locations of the stores and apartment complexes, the bus moving very slowly because of traffic, he met the hard grey eyes of a woman on the sidewalk.

She was pale, blonde, and tall, maybe a little taller than him, though he couldn’t quite tell. As the bus moved she walked beside it, and there was an elegance to her movement-not grace, exactly, but highness and haughtiness. She was dressed rich, too; entirely in white; her blouse was silk and her neck and ears were adorned with large pearls.

She was a mutant. Scott didn’t even know just how he could tell, but he could. He wasn’t sure whether she realized what he was; was he still giving something away, even to those who weren’t looking at the history at Xavier’s on his curriculum vitae?

But even more than her being a mutant, he was dead sure she was bad news. That was a sense that didn’t need explanation; it was one he’d developed through experience.

He wondered if Ororo might be able to identify her for him. But as soon as the bus pulled away and he lost contact with those strange, terrifying stone eyes, he tried to think of a good description of her, a simple, factual one of her like he’d developed the ability to make as part of doing reconnaissance, he found he couldn’t. No matter how he tried, he kept getting distracted by the thought of her diamond-cold stare, the arrogant bounce of her blond locks with every movement of her smooth, pale head, and the strange, inexplicable thrill that mixed with his almost irrational fear of her. For the first time, he wondered if the cure had taken away a few things of his he hadn’t expected to have to give up. Such as his ability to keep his head together in a situation like this one, where great power was needed and great responsibility was to be exercised. Or maybe he’d just lost that along with Jean.

He finally had to resort to scribbling notes on the back of his curriculum vitae, about the Hellfire Club as well as her, because he had to send Ororo something. He just hoped the X-Men would be able to make use of it.


	3. In the Public World

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Scott begins teaching, has a couple of dreams, and considers seeing an old acquaintance.

Scott had during his life teaching runaways at Xavier’s been aware not only about the difficulty of getting jobs, but that things weren’t good in most of America’s public school systems, particularly urban ones. From his students he’d heard positive horror stories of how they’d been treated if they put one toe out of the line, how they had no right to privacy anymore, how drugs were forced on them even over their parents’ protests, how police were brought in to bully them, how they were forced to make humiliating apologies in public if they dared accuse a teacher of any wrongdoing, under threat of expulsion. While he’d been interviewing he’d heard a new variety of horror stories from other teachers he’d talked to, about how their bosses had threatened to fire them if they didn’t doctor test results to make the school look better, how they weren’t allowed to chose their own curriculum anymore, but were forced to teach books they thought too easy or even facts they knew to be untrue, how they were paid so little they were seriously worried about what would happen if one of their children got sick, and how they were inevitably blamed for everything they could do little about.

Still, as he stood in that classroom waiting for the first block of students to come in, he couldn’t help but feel optimistic. Having met a few of his fellow staff members, he found himself liking far more people than he disliked, and though there was a standardized test to teach to, and not one that impressed him very much, he’d been allowed relative freedom in how he prepared his classes. Someone had even given him a free set of sharpies, even as they warned him that the ones in the classroom would inevitably be out of ink. There was a general feeling of trust within the faculty, and he knew enough to not take that for granted.

The first day of school apparently wasn’t too traumatizing for the students either. Not that they looked that excited either, as they filtered in, mostly in small groups, but that didn’t bother him too much. He recognized tale tell signs of a handful of them being mutants as well; one boy had ears just a little too big and tufts of hair in an atypical place below them, one girl had hair of too dazzling a blue for it to be because of hair dye, and one boy who looked like a usual human to the casual observer nonetheless moved a little more fast and sharp than was quite natural. There were probably too many kids for an ideal class, but he could deal with it.

What bothered him more were the looks of the last three students, the ones who came in just before the second bell rung, two boys and one girl. One of the boys was a weird shade of light purple, and the other was obviously a mutant too; his eyes were too big. The girl gave off no signals of being a mutant, but he wouldn’t have been surprised. And all three of them walked in alone, drawn into themselves, and wary, sure signs of having been bullied, and while no one outright went after any of them as they sat down, he saw the girl meet the eyes of the girl seated in the adjoining desk, and flinch away far too hard.

At the time same he noticed there was a murmur passing through the students on the other side of the classroom, and after the bell they quieted far too quickly. He already had a feeling on why that was; it was too much to hope for in a class as big as this that no one would recognize him.

Sure enough, he had barely officially introduced himself as Mr. Summers, when without even raising her hand first, a girl in the front row demanded, “As in Cyclops Scott Summers?”

“Yes,” he started, “but-”

He shouldn’t have even tried to go on; he was interrupted by no less than five people. Their words all drowned each other’s out, but then a sixth student, the one with the blue hair, spoke a moment or so later, “What in the world are you doing here in Elmhurst?!”

“I have retired from the X-Men,” he explained; he’d decided already that was how he’d put it. “I decided to take the Cure for personal reasons,” another thing he’d decided to say, to try to minimize any statement he was making by having normal eyes now, “so I am no longer a mutant, but I am still a teacher, and that is why I am here today.” A little too speechlike for this crowd, maybe; he saw a few eyerolls. The kids at Xavier’s had been different like that; they had looked to their teachers for inspiration and more than one kind of guidance. Many of the students here had no use for him at all.

“Why did you retire?” asked a dull-faced blonde boy. “You’re not that old.”

“That is my private business,” said Scott. “Nor am I here, by the way, to spend all my time talking about the X-Men when I am supposed to be teaching you Algebra. No more talk; we have cards to fill out as well.”

Most of the kids looked really disappointed, and a few continued to asked questions. Scott let his voice get sharper, and they did quiet surprisingly quickly. He worried it might be because they were afraid of him, of someone who had been a mighty X-Man, even if he no longer had his power.

By the time the cards were filled out and passed up, however, the class was starting to feel normal, and thankfully he always found Algebra II a little easier to teach than Algebra I. By the time the bell rung he was feeling good; of the forty-odd students he thought a good twenty of them were genuinely interested in the subject, and none of the others seemed inclined to be too disruptive, though his instincts were a little wary of the purple boy, whose name was Neal Marray. Not unlike the students at Xavier’s, really, plenty of whom weren’t too interested in Algebra either.

But then, as the rest of the class hurried out, given way too little time, really, to get from one classroom to another, the girl who had come in last, a certain Qiu Xi who went by the name of Michelle, instead approached his desk. Always ready to help a student out who needed it, Scott sat down, though it made her tower over him; he hadn’t realized how tall she was.

“Mr. Summers,” she asked, “Excuse me, but I would just like to ask, what do you think of minors needing to get parental permission to take the Cure?”

Was she going to ask him to help get around her parents? He couldn’t do that, and he would have to tell her that, but doing so first thing sounded like a bad idea. “I think it’s generally a good idea,” he said. “Though I actually don’t know the details of the law.”

Her face darkened, then scrunched up as if she was trying to prevent something, then said, “You don’t think me an idiot, do you? You at Xavier’s are legal guardian to a lot of your students, right? There’s no way you don’t know all the ins and outs of the new law.  New York’s law at the very least and probably all the other state’s laws too. You’ve probably consulted with lawyers over it, haven’t you?”

Ororo, Scott thought, probably did and had. But by the time lawmakers had gotten around to dealing with the issue, he’d already heard Jean and left. “I’m sure they’ve done that work at Xavier’s,” he tried to explain. “And if you want, I could even try to contact them. They should be willing to help you.” They would help, he thought. If a young mutant needed their help surely Ororo would never turn her back. They might help even more than he felt he ethically could, which gave him another kind of dilemma.

“LIAR!” she yelled, then hastily clamped her hands up over her ears, but even so, a puff of smoke escaped the right one. Almost automatically and without breaking her gaze at her she lunged to the side and grabbed the window. 

“I’m not lying,” he said to her. “I didn’t get a chance to deal with the law before I left.”

“But you expect me to just be a sucker and say ‘okay’ when you fob me off on them?” she insisted. “Have you read what your new principal has been saying to the media?”

Scott hadn’t been as much as she probably thought he had been, but he knew the gist of it. He supposed she had a point, but even so he protested, “Ms. Munroe will never deny help to a young mutant who really needs it.”

“She won’t think I will,” sighed Michelle. “Noone does. You don’t, do you?”

“I don’t know your situation well enough.”

“All right then,” she leaned in, and Scott fought the temptation to stand up; he was not there to intimidate her. Besides, he wasn’t completely sure she still wouldn’t be taller than him. “I’ll tell you about my situation. Every time I get upset I blow smoke out of my ears. Occasionally it sets off the fire alarm, and then often I get punished even though I can’t help it, and all the kids call me Fire Drill and harass me and try to provoke the smoke so they can get out of class. In middle school it was so big a problem I had to be the perfect student and never be caught so much as running in the halls, even when I had two classes in a row on opposite sides of the building and only four minutes to get between them, because the faculty were just looking for a chance to expel me, because they didn’t want to have to deal with my condition. My parents seem to think the only acceptable solution is to learn ‘emotional control’,” she raised her hands and made quotes gestures and said the phrase in a sarcastically high pitch, “with this psychologist who drives me crazy, and think I don’t need to do anything else because I do less of it now than I used to, but there’s still a lot of times it happens and I can’t stop it and everyone hates me because of it and still tries to use me to get out of class.” She had to stop to take a very deep breath; there was a small amount of smoke now leaking out of both her ears, though with the window open the chance of it setting the alarm off wasn’t too high.

Scott could understand why this teenager might think she was in Hell; arguably she even was. But at her age, there was much risk that taking the Cure simply would not be a rational decision for her; especially when it was a permanent solution to problems that probably wouldn’t last forever; he understood why her parents weren’t letting her. Then again, the way she was going, she probably wouldn’t feel differently at 18 anyway, when they couldn’t stop her anymore.

But until then, before she could start again, he interjected, “There are ways you can make things easier without resorting to the Cure. See if you can have your parents talk to the school about accommodations; they might find some way of reducing the fire alarms, like maybe having you always sit next to a window you can open if need be. In fact, I’ll insist you have a seat by one in my class, if you want.”

“We tried that in middle school.” She shook her head. “They weren’t willing to lift a finger to help me.”

“That doesn’t mean the people here wouldn’t be now,” Scott persisted. “Listen, the faculty here are good people. Even if the people who ran your middle school didn’t want to help you, they will. And if your psychologist is actually worsening the problem, for god’s sake, find another.” He understood the frustrations of that, though; they’d never been able to keep a good psychologist at Xavier’s, though they’d tried more than once.

“You really think so?” she asked it as if she wanted to believe it.

“At least give it a try,” he said. “And choose a window and I’ll insist everyone let you have the desk next to it.”

“I’ll still stand out,” she sighed, almost to herself. “But then again, I do anyway...” Another pause, and she said, “Thanks. I gotta run.”

Having the second period off before his third period class gave Scott a chance to further think on the matter. How many of his mutant students wanted to take the Cure, but their parents wouldn’t allow it? He supposed he ought to have an opinion on it, especially because he doubted Michelle Xi would be the last student to ask him about it or even come to him for help. It was an issue where he could see both sides of it, especially since there were probably parents who forbade it for the wrong reasons, and even more might instead force their children to take the Cure, and how that could entirely be eradicated he had no idea.

He looked over the locater cards, and as he did, he found himself making a mark on the cards for the mutant students; if they were more likely than their peers to need advice or help from him, it would be a good idea to keep careful track of who they were. He would make duplicates, he decided, and keep a separate file. Quietly; certainly the last thing they needed was to be singled out anywhere other than in his head.

####  **That Night**

It probably wasn’t a good thing, Scott was aware, that he already felt exhausted when he got back to his new apartment. After all, he was looking forward to many, many evenings busier than this one would be. Plus if he wanted to eat anything, he was going to have to prepare it himself. Which hadn’t been something he never did, but he admitted he’d fallen off since the student body had gotten so big they’d needed to hire someone. Cleaning would take some time too, though the apartment wasn’t that much bigger than the room he’d shared with Jean.

Still, he decided, it was his first day. Surely it was fine if he took a nap first. He lay down on the weird purple couch he’d gotten at a furniture sale-he’d tried to buy everything as cheaply as possible, since he hadn’t known how long he’d need to make Ororo’s money last-and closed his eyes.

He was so ready to dream of Jean still he thought he almost felt her with him before he was completely asleep. Certainly she was there as soon as he was, as she had been most nights since he’s originally thought he’d lost her.

In fact, when he’d thought about it while awake, Scott had started to think there was something off about the dream Jean who not only was almost there almost the instant the dream started, but stayed the entire time, and never vanished, or turned into someone else, or anything else people in dreams tended to do. She was an extremely concrete and vivid presence too; he never failed to feel skin or cloth when he touched her(none of the dreams had been sexual yet, so he didn’t know how that would go). But most of the time he didn’t care about that any more than if he cared about whether this was healthy. He’d rather have a dream Jean at night than any other woman in real life, and that was all there was to that.

That night there were on the motorbike, and he was aware it was a dream, even though he could feel the heat and weight of her body against his back. He didn’t recognize the terrain they were driving through, though it looked like it could be any part of upstate New York in the autumn. “Don’t worry,” she whispered. “We’re not going to Alkali Lake.”

“Good,” said Scott. He’d gone there way too much in the dreams he’d had before she’d come back mad and called him back there. “But then where are we going?”

“We won’t get there tonight,” she replied. “But you’re in no hurry to get there anyway, though you’ll have to eventually, of course.” That seemed like a good enough answer, to know they were just gliding along the road, which he didn’t think would have any confusing forks or turns anyway, and have Jean warm and loving against his back.

Nor did they have any trouble hearing each other over the motorcycle’s roar, as they talked about his day, about Michelle Xi and the other mutant students. She seemed to already know the basics but not the details, but it was a dream; there probably wasn’t a rational explanation for that. Jean asked him if the girl reminded him of Rogue, and with a little bit of shock Scott realized she did; their powers weren’t really comparable, and they didn’t really look or sound that alike. “There’s something in their demeanor that’s similar,” he said. “This anger mixed with this resignation at the world.”

“Well Rogue doesn’t have it anymore,” noted Jean, “since she took the Cure, but that was after you left.” She did that sometimes, gave him updates on the X-Men. So far nothing he could’ve verified in the news, so he had no idea how accurate they were. Though he supposed Rogue taking the Cure, at least, made sense; he knew how much she’d not wanted her mutation.

It was a little weirder, he admitted, when she added, “Erik is in New York too, now. He finally got tired of staying in Chicago. He hasn’t found a job yet, though. When he has the money he might become your neighbor, though the Jews around here can be a little orthodox for him.”

“I have nothing to say to him,” said Scott coldly. He supposed it was easier for him to say that than it would’ve been for the other oldest X-Men; he had only been taken in by the Professor after his longtime partner had left. But he didn’t think he would’ve felt differently about if he’d had any attachment to him first, only more betrayed, probably.

“You think of things in straight lines,” sighed Jean, but she snuggled closer and didn’t really sound like she was that interested in arguing the point.

They came to a large pond, not like Alkali Lake, one broad and still and peaceful, surrounded by trees bearing deep and subtle autumn hues, while the setting sun reflected across the water. Scott stopped just to let the subtle colors wash through him, the kind that would’ve blurred together into brown before.

“You should take a weekend out and go to Bear Mountain next month, when the leaves will be at their best,” said Jean. “Remember how Ororo always went there on the 20th or so and took any students who were interesting in going with her? Go to the top of one the mountains there, and then you’ll see the colors of autumn.”

Scott remembered then Ororo had done that annual trip, and very often the younger students had shown interest in going with her, though she complained that on the day they often bailed out. “Thanks,” he said. “I think I will.”

They sat by the lake for the rest of the dream, in each other’s arms, not even doing anything else, just being there with each other. Scott woke up with a smile on his face, but a feeling of deep loneliness welling within him, and an uneasy feeling that even leaving his previous life behind completely wouldn't save him from drowning in his grief, because he could never leave Jean behind, no matter what he did.

He kept himself busy the rest of the evening. He cooked, he cleaned, he read some news websites-there was nothing in their headlines besides ordinary headlines of the world struggling and people killing each other in countries not as fortunate at the one he lived in, nothing about mutants or ex-mutants. He reviewed his planned upcoming lessons. He read about Ancient Greece. It kept him calm, if it didn’t actually make him feel better.

He didn’t dream of Jean again when he properly went to bed, which left him disappointed when he woke the next morning.

####  **Two Weeks Later**

By late September most of the student inquiries about Scott as Cyclops had stopped, he had answered most of the questions that students had put to him in the way Michelle Xi had done so, he’d gotten used to teaching in the more rigid, scheduled style that most schools demanded though Xavier’s had lacked, and he was starting to feel good about himself as a person again. If he wasn’t happy, exactly, he was becoming more content, at least.

Then one morning he walked in to find half the class, including all the mutant students except Michelle, who was sitting by her open window, leaning over the desk of Tom Wu. Looking up as they came in, one of them asked, “Mr. Summers, is it true you met The Incredible Nightcrawler?”

“It is,” said Scott, “but I don’t know if the two of us really spoke to each other much.” His most vivid memory of Kurt Wagner was in fact of him praying at what they had thought had been Jean’s death, which meant he still could not be thought of without pain almost too extreme to bear. “He was only with us for a few days.” He also vaguely remembered how surprised everyone had been when he hadn’t chosen to stay after Jean’s funeral. Ororo had seemed especially sad.

“Well, he’s coming to town with the Ringling Brothers,” said Tom. “They’ll be in New York next month, starting on the 15th. I’ve got the list of performers.”

“Just another reason to boycott them,” said a disgusted Valerie Penderson from where she was sitting and looking disdainfully at the group. “It seems they think more of a man who tried to kill the President and probably sent mutant rights back a decade than they think of the animals they abuse.”

“Wasn’t he under mental control?” pointed out Neal Marray.

“You don’t really believe that, do you?” scoffed Valerie.

“I know for a fact it is true,” Scott said, more harshly than he meant to. But how could he bring himself to explain to these kids that he knew just what had happened with Kurt Wagner, because he himself had experienced the same thing? The questions would be insistent and impossible to escape. He’d end up having to talk about it the entire class period, probably including how they’d escaped from Styker’s base, and there was no way he was ever going to be able to keep his composure, the way a good teacher always needed to, while talking about that.

Though while he felt a little guilt for making Valerie quail, she did at least seemed to believe him, because she said, “Well, you still should boycott them anyway, Nightcrawler or no Nightcrawler.”

Scott was sympathetic to her point of view on this, but as the students went back to their desks and he went to his to begin class, he found himself thinking he might go. Maybe not, if he wasn’t up to see a man so strongly associated with the loss of Jean, but he thought by the time the circus came in he might be. Maybe just get a chance to meet with the guy and see how he was doing; despite the associations, he was still a little curious about that.

He put it out of his mind then, going to the welcome straightforwardness of algebra equations, where the variable never meant more than just another number and there was no debate, ultimately, as to what it stood for. The class seemed to be making normal progress and thankfully most of the students had done their homework this time, and when he called on students to do in class equations only one of them in back struggled with it, and even he figured out the answer when guided.

When the class filed out, however, Scott took his new laptop, a recent purchase he’d made to reward himself for success at his new job, and opened up the Ringling Brothers website. It didn’t really tell him much about The Incredible Nightcrawler he found that interesting; they didn’t even mention his real name. Next he googled the teleporter himself and learned he’d signed with the Ringling Brothers a couple of months after parting ways with the X-Men, that he had never even been arrested was a cause of anger on many right-wing websites with some even attempting to ally themselves with normal boycotters of the circus(those did not really make for comfortable bedfellows), and he had been asked for an interview by every news outlet in existence and turned them all down, releasing only a single public statement explaining he’d been mind-controlled and now wanted to get on with his life. It raised the question in Scott’s head of whether Kurt would even want to see him, if he really was trying to forget what had happened; that would be very understandable.

He didn’t think about it again that much until the evening, when he couldn’t nap anymore because he had too much homework to grade. Now he often turned on the news when cooking, since it was an efficient way to hear the main headlines, and at some point he had stopped wanting to know about every last thing that happened in the world, because it wasn’t healthy any more to dwell on the world’s the way he once had, back when he had regularly been going out to do something about them. He was watching the local show, and towards the end of the program they did a piece on the circus and its detractors. He watched, listening through all the points about animal abuse he really did think were good points but had heard before, waiting to see if any of the concerned citizens they interviewed objected to their hiring an officially unwilling White House invader.

If they did, none of them brought it up. He was just debating whether to feel relieved or disappointed when they cut back to the news anchor, who said, “Also featured in the Ringling Brothers show is Kurt Wagner, going by the stage name of The Incredible Nightcrawler, but now more commonly known as the mutant that infiltrated the White House and scared the living daylights out of the president just before the Stryker Incident.” At least the commonly used name for those events appointed blame to the proper person, even if her next words were, “An ambiguous figure, who claims Stryker mind-controlled him and sent him to the White House to obtain presidential authorization for his activities, but the question remains how many people really believe that.”

Then she went onto the weather, which Scott supposed he should pay attention to because it could be important, but he didn’t really. With the news over he turned the TV off, pressing the buttons of the remote much harder than necessary.

It was still hard when he ran into this, this everyday automatic suspicion of mutants, often for less reason than this, just out of an assumption that something in their DNA that made them so powerful also made them untrustworthy. He’d had it directed towards him too, even as an ex-mutant. It was enough to make him want to buy the circus tickets just as a general statement of support towards an unfairly maligned person, as well as a fellow victim of Stryker’s mental abuse.

He ended up stewing about it all through dinner before throwing himself into his work, which so far had worked pretty well for him as a distraction at home when he needed it. Although he tried not to favor any of his students too much over the others, even in his thoughts, he allowed himself a bit of pleasure when he saw how much Michelle Anderson’s work had improved. And thankfully everybody had actually done all the equations this time; earlier that week four students had all skipped the last five. He wasn’t sure if there’d been a misunderstanding or if they’d all gotten together to play with his mind. Which of course they might have done because of who he was, though it also might have just been them being mischievous kids and had nothing to do with him in particular.

Still Kurt and the circus lingered at the back of his head, and when he went to sleep, he fully expected to spend his dreams discussing the matter with Jean, the way they’d sometimes talked over his classes already. But she did not appear in his dream at all that night.

Instead he dreamed he was at the circus, in the front row, watching Kurt perform, using his teleporting ability to perform cheap gags like tossing a hoop across the big top, then moving to the other side to catch it. At first with each trick the crowd was an incomprehensible mass of being this side of too loud, giving Scott the urge to rub his ears. But slowly he became aware that while the general sound was of cheering, he could hear the words  _mutie_  and  _bluehead_  coming from more than one mouth, though they were yelling things like _Way to go, mutie!_  which somehow made their use of the word feel worse.

Then suddenly the man next to him, who was much bigger and stronger than Scott had noticed at the beginning of the dream, grabbed him by the shoulders, moved to push him forward, and said, “You want to join him, mutie? Go perform tricks for us? Juggle balls and blast them with your eyes?” And as he spoke, Scott felt the heat swell behind his eyes, and realized he needed to put on glasses, but he knew he’d left them at home. He turned his head to face the man, to tell him he needed to stop or he’d blow the whole tent up, but the man started laughing and yelling “Do it, do it!” He woke up yelling “Stop! Stop!”

He looked at the alarm clock; it was close to six, too early to get up and too late to get back to sleep. He closed his eyes and tried not to think, but that was of no use. He thought further about Kurt, wondering if he was fitting in at his new circus, if they were kind to him there, if any of the people he saw every day refused to believe he’d been under mind control. How much the audience yelled slurs at him, because he was pretty sure it had to happen sometimes. If he ever thought about the X-Men and regretted saying no, especially when he’d really seemed to be building something with Ororo, or at least it had seemed that way to Scott from some of the remarks he’d heard from the others after he’d left.

In the adjoining apartment someone started to yell. With pauses, so probably over the phone. Scott couldn’t make out all her words, but it sounded generally like she was having an argument over her child, presumably with his father. Still he couldn’t quite make out the reason for it, until her tone abruptly turned very anxious as he heard, way too clear, “A mutant? What signs has he shown of it?”

Suddenly really not wanting to hear the rest of it, Scott leapt out of bed and fled for the shower. Then he lingered there, still able to hear her voice but thankfully faint and wordless, until it stopped and he felt safe to turn off the water, which by then had run cold.

He continued to think about it as he made himself breakfast, but by the time he sat down and had the first bite, he had decided animal abuse or no animal abuse, he was going to the circus.


	4. When the Incredible Nightcrawler Came to Town

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The visit from the circus is followed by Emma intruding further on Scott's life.

He didn’t buy the most expensive tickets, if only because that wasn’t practical on his teacher’s salary. Still, the first performance of the first day found him not too far back under the big top as he settled into his seat, a little earlier than he usually got to events, but he was holding out hope Kurt might spot him, and thus know he was available to meet and talk if the teleporter wanted to.

To pass the time, he scanned the other seats for anyone he knew. There still weren’t that many people he’d met during his time in Elmhurst, but he spotted some of his students, and also Mr. Connors, his wife, and what looked like their kids on the far side of the tent. He tried to wave, but they didn’t seem to notice; he supposed the tent was too big.

Then, five minutes before the show was supposed to start, he saw another familiar face enter the tent. In came the blonde woman in white he had spotted from the bus on the day of his interview, whom he hadn’t seen since, though sometimes he’d tried to surreptitiously scan who was coming and going from the adjoining building; he didn’t even know why he was convinced she was associated with the Hellfire Club, he just was.

She was dressed all in white again, this time with a fashionable jacket and scarf and the same big pearls. There were two men with her, one a hard-faced man in a striking black suit that Scott was fairly certain he’d seen a photo of somewhere before, maybe in the X-Men’s databanks of people to be concerned about, and a larger man also dressed in black, with longish golden hair and a bushy golden beard. He watched as the three of them sat down together, one man on each side of the woman, and chatted amongst themselves. At one point something the blond man said made the woman throw back her head and laugh, and Scott found himself having trouble looking away. Maybe it was just how the lighting in the tent caught her eyes, but they were very bright, and there was something about her broad smile that drew him, even as it bothered him how hard a smile it was.

She was still smiling as she moved her face out of his view, and he wasn’t able to see it again before the lights went down. Still, it took him a long moment to put her out of his mind and focus on the show to come.

It was a good show. He was especially impressed with some of the acrobats, one of whom managed to do things with a pair of trapezes that he wouldn’t thought impossible for someone who didn’t have some sort of flying ability, which he supposed she might have had, except then she’d probably be doing even more incredible things. Kurt Wagner wasn’t the only obvious mutant in the show; there was a purple woman introduced as Violetta West who rode in on horseback sideways, and proceeded to juggle balls with her very long and flexible toes, showing a concentration that made clear her tricks required work as well as ability to be able to do. Though was it just his imagination, or was she getting less applause than all the other acts had so far?

Kurt finally appeared in the second half of the show. The applause for him was definitely very muted. But his act was something to see. He started with trapezes, doing difficult somersaults and teleporting from one trapeze to another right in the middle of them. Then he went on to teleporting himself from thin perch to thin perch, often standing on one foot the entire time. He also did the sillier tricks from Scott’s dream where he tossed things to catch them, but he made it more difficult by throwing them up to the top of the tent and catching them with his feet or upside down when they were halfway down. For the second half of his act, he teleported to the very top of the tent, and crawled and swung around on what looked like carefully placed hooks. This did get more than a few murmurs of admiration, and the applause when at last he finished and took his bows was a little bit louder.

Scott didn’t think Kurt had spotted him; he had clearly had to concentrate on what he was doing. But then when it came time for the finale, everyone in the circus came out for a final bow. Kurt came out with the others, and with some others in the audience already standing, Scott stood up as well, and then he saw the teleporter’s eyes fly wide while meeting his.

After the show he went to the back of the tent, where the first person he ran into was the purple woman. She immediately said to him, “Scott Summers? Kurt thought you might come looking to see him. Wait here.”

She came back about twenty minutes or so later with Kurt, now changed out of his costume into jeans and a white t-shirt that looked surprisingly loud on his blue body. He looked nervous as he said to Scott, “Hi. Would you like to take a walk with me around the field?”

They exchanged pleasantries as they walked, and Scott told Kurt about teaching in Elmhurst, though he carefully avoided talking about why he had taken the Cure and left the X-Men, and Kurt didn’t press him about it. Kurt talked about the return to circus life, and said “This is where I belong,” twice. It was actually in such a way that Scott thought there might be something he wasn’t telling him, but while in the past he would have pressed Kurt about it, now he almost felt like he didn’t have the right to, the same way he felt he felt he ought to limit how much he did about the Hellfire Club, because he wasn’t Cyclops anymore. So he let him ramble, and laughed at his stories about the prankster they’d been dealing with on the road.

They walked slowly around the tents and trucks and other structures, and even stopped to watch as the elephants were fed and watered-Scott didn’t know about abuse, but they certainly were being fed a lot, at least-but when they circled back around to the spot they’d started from it was clear their meeting was over. Kurt turned nervous again too, guilty, perhaps? Scott tried to be steady and kind as he said, “So, if we happen to run into each other again?”

“If you’re still here when next the circus comes to town, of course,” said Kurt, and he managed a bit of the too-wide show grin he’d had on during his act as he added, “for you must always come and see The Incredible Nightcrawler!”

“I look forward to it,” said Scott, and he genuinely did; Kurt was worth watching.

He did feel a little unsatisfied as he went away, gazing back at the circus tents and trucks through the bus window until they were blocked from his sight. But he wasn’t sure what he could’ve done differently.

####  **The Following Friday**

There wasn’t as much talk of the circus in his class or the school in general as he listened for. Later in the week Scott found himself thinking he’d expected too much. Kurt Wagner wasn’t really anyone of significance to anyone in the school besides him, and even the business with the elephants was just another subject for the students; even those who were particularly interested in animal rights had only so much time to worry about the circus animals when there were so many other abused animals in the world too.

That wasn’t to say he heard no opinions. When he walked in before the bell on Monday, for one thing, it was to hear Valerie rant about how too many people went and they ought to be ashamed of themselves for supporting animal abuse, which maybe should’ve made him feel guiltier for going than he did. She emphasized how crowded the transit had gotten around the location in a clear attempt to encourage others to complain about that, at least, and one other girl who lived near the area did take the bait; from the way her mother had apparently gone through hell trying to buy groceries, she’d had good reason to anyway.

That was all of substance he heard from his students. In the staffroom there was a bit more talk. Plenty of the teachers disapproved of the use of the elephants as well, of course, though there weren’t as comfortable scolding their colleagues for going. Most of those who had gone said they’d been more impressed by Violetta West than The Incredible Nightcrawler, though Scott was sure some of them were lying through their teeth about that. Thankfully only one person asked him for his opinion about the latter, and he managed to ward him off with a noncommittal response.

He ended up staying late Friday evening, looking for some student assignments he’d managed to misplace. He still thought this school used far more paper than they needed to(and they didn’t recycle it half as much as they ought to), and it was days like this he was only all too aware how little he was used to that. He had managed to find half of them and put them away in his briefcase when there was a knock on his classroom door. “Mr. Summers,” he recognized the voice of one of his fellow teachers. “There’s a woman here named Emma Frost who wants to see you.”

The name rung a vague bell; had she also been in the X-Men’s database, the same way the Hellfire Club was? Scott thought it might have been. But he didn’t have long to wonder who she was, since when he opened the door it was to the same cold-faced blonde woman he’d seen on the street and at the circus. She was once again all in white, now wearing a business suit with her pearl earrings.

“Hello, Mr. Summers,” she said to him, and her voice was like the rest of her, cold and hard, but there was something about it that made him think...he didn’t know. Anyway, it didn’t make him think it enough that he wasn’t on his guard. “I would like if you would be so kind, when you’re done here, to come meet with me in my office in the building next to this one.”

Scott wasn’t so foolish to not assume that didn’t mean big trouble. Once upon a time he might have agreed to it anyway in the hopes of learning more about a threat, but those days were over for him. “I’m sorry,” he replied. “But I can’t. I have a lot of work to do tonight, and that’s if finding the rest of my student’s papers doesn’t take me another hour.”

“Mr. Summers, I am not making a request,” she told him, her voice turning still harder. “You should be aware that I have the ability to control minds and I can make you accompany me without difficulty. It might not be a very pleasant experience for you. I really would much rather you came with me willingly so that we could avoid all that fuss.”

Vague thoughts passed through Scott’s head about threatening to go to the police, but he had the feeling that might not end well for him. At the very least, he ought not to try it until he knew just what she could do. Perhaps he could contact Ororo about this; the X-Men might be interested in the information.

“I could stop you from telling them, you know,” she cut in; it seemed she was definitely telepathic. “I could even wipe your memory of our meeting, though honestly, I don’t think I will. Now are you coming with me or not?”

“Seems I don’t have a choice in the matter,” was all he could say. “Could you please not make it too long, though? I do have work to do.”

“I don’t think we’ll need you for long,” she shrugged. “We just want to ask a few questions, that’s all.”

Scott didn’t entirely believe that would be all, especially not with the way she hustled him out of the school and across the street. The man in the lobby didn’t say anything; apparently tenants of the building were not required to sign guests in. He was surprised when she pressed the button for the fourth floor instead of the fifth. Which she probably registered telepathically, because she then said, “You’re not getting back into our actual offices; there’s no need for that.” Her voice was now very harsh and hostile, a dropping of pretenses.

“Back?” Scott demanded as his first response. “For your information, I was never in them in the first place!”

He almost felt her slice through his mind, all ready to call him a liar. But instead she had to cry out in shock, “You’re telling the truth, aren’t you?”

The elevator doors slid open on the fourth floor as she pushed him out and recovered herself, asking, “Okay, then. Who did the breaking in for you?”

“Look, I don’t even know what you’re talking about, and whatever it is, I had nothing to do with it. I’m more or less out of the business anyway.”

“Then what were you doing with Kurt Wagner at the circus?” she demanded. “We know he didn’t really leave the X-Men when he claimed to go back to the circus life, and we also know he was present when two episodes happened that I won’t get into, though one of them happened while you were still with the X-Men, and after the second one he was spotted on the streets even when the circus had left town the previous day!”

This was all news to Scott, but forced himself not to feel any emotional reaction as he responded, “Can I not want to see an old acquaintance again, especially when I’ve spent the past weeks enduring my students accusing him of being the criminal I know very well he’s not? That’s honestly all that was.”

He must not have suppressed his surprise entirely, though, because he felt a little bit of pressure still on his mind. He was half-expecting her to just wipe his memory at this point, whatever she’d said earlier; since she clearly had to just be realizing he wasn’t involved, and it made sense for her to want to keep it that way. But she didn’t; instead she backed off, both physically and mentally, and sighed, “I’m going to keep an eye on you, Mr. Summers. Remember we’re right next door.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” he said, and pressed the button to summon the down elevator. Much to his relief, it came immediately, and she made no attempt to follow him as he hurried in. Still he practically held his breath until he had crossed through the lobby without being stopped, and even then he didn’t really relax fully until he was on his normal bus home.

The minute he was in his apartment, which intellectually he suspected was not any safer a place than the bus was but it still made him feel safer, he sat down and started the email to Ororo. He supposed the Hellfire Club would probably find out about his contacting her sooner or later, and he wasn’t sure what they’d do to him in response, but he had never been a man to shy away from fighting the good fight on those kinds of grounds and he never would be, even if he wasn’t involved in the good fight anymore for other reasons.

Until then, he told himself not to think about it. It wasn’t much use, though. He felt a little twitchy the entire night, the way he had once felt when he had watched the news in the mansion and afterwards been able to smell the next mission coming. For the first time, he even seriously considered his decision to walk away, on the grounds that he might not be happy not being an X-Man anymore. It didn’t help matters when the local news talked about a shoot-out that had happened in the northern part of the state(nothing to do with any mutants, though), and talked in general about how the crime rate had really grown over the summer and seemed to have remained high since.

He half-expected to have another bad dream. But instead he dreamed of Jean again. The two of them were continuing a long trek through New York State, which he thought might be getting larger than it was in real life, and the leaves were starting to go from red and gold to brown, a chill creep into the air, though then again, that might have been because they were more or less going north as well. He was starting to hope the dreams would just make New York State grow bigger and bigger, and keep them from ever coming anywhere near Alkali Lake.

It almost made him refuse when she asked if they could stop and go tree climbing; he was afraid of the view they might end up with. But when she started wheedling him he knew better than to bother with a battle he was going to lose anyway.

He’d never know Jean to go climbing trees. Sure, X-Man training included some climbing lessons, so they both knew how to do it no problem, but it wasn’t something they’d ever had interest in outside of that. But now, as he parked the bike next to a promising-looking old tree with knots and contours on its trunk and thick low branches, Jean was already scrambling upward, fast enough he had to hasten himself just to get on the tree before she went out of sight. Still he didn’t have to worry about keeping track of her, since she helpfully kept calling down to him.

More than one memory came back to him as he climbed, of not only their training and the climbing wall, but also from his childhood, when he and Alex had spent autumn afternoons often sitting or playing under the pair of trees in their family’s yard that had been just of this type; he wondered if that type was common in actual upstate New York. It made him feel sad again, as thinking about the years before he’d literally blown the roof off the senior prom always had; not having his mutation anymore was never going to change that either. Nor even was abdicating his responsibilities and burdens as an X-Man, which he sometimes felt was what had made him even more different from that light-hearted boy under those trees.

“Here’s the top! Come on, you’re almost there.” Jean’s voice broke through his thoughts, and he looked up to see the sky easily visible and his hands almost at her feet; he watched them shift around as she tried to get the best perch. He resumed climbing, and ten seconds later his head broke the treetops, the top of them bobbed above a sea of red and brown, leaves glinting in the light breeze and low-lying sun.

After a moment’s pause he forced himself to look around. Thankfully Alkali Lake was not visible, nor was anything he would even associate with that part of North America. Instead the tree carpet led into the Catskills, which he thought might be the destination his dreams took them to first, though they seemed taller and a bit barer than he knew them to be in real life. But more striking was actually the view behind. The landscape that way stretched off an unnatural distance, until not only could he see New York City, even when it was so clearly very far away, but he almost seemed able to distinguish Westchester apart from its surroundings.

And then came Jean’s voice behind him, soft and low, “I couldn’t stop thinking of home, at least when I was still completely in my own head. I thought of you there. Teaching the children, flying the plane, spending your free time out on your motorcycle. You should’ve used it more.”

“I know,” he said, and he did know, somehow. Maybe deep down he’d known even then, when he’d instead been wallowing in his grief. He wished he could do that time over now. Maybe he even would’ve still taken the Cure and gone into his current retirement from the X-Men, if he’d still been convinced he couldn’t handle returning to the mansion after going to meet with Jean at Alkali Lake, but he could’ve handled the time before that better.

He was still looking back, towards Westchester and trying to discern the school, when Jean reached out, turned him by the shoulders, and gently kissed him. It was the first time she’d done so in his dreams, but that she was kissing him now, in that moment, didn’t seem that remarkable to him. Just perfect, and he tried to get close enough to really embrace her. But it proved impossible up in the branches, when the wind seemed to be getting steadily stronger too, until it felt like it was moving them both around with big invisible hands, coming between them and not wanting them to get too close. He was really struggling against it when he woke up.

It took him a moment longer than usual to comprehend he was back in his new apartment, that Jean was  _gone_  in a way that there in the darkness made him still want to cry, even with how long it had been. Maybe even more now, when with each month he’d felt the truth settle in more, solid and unavoidable. He wanted to both tell her he was sorry for behaving how he had immediately after losing her, and ask her if it was ever going to at least hurt less than it still did. But that was all ridiculous, because the Jean he saw still might very well come from nowhere but his own mind. The truth was she was dead, undisputedly, and it was no use crying over what he couldn’t change.

Even if he still did so while showering that morning.

####  **That afternoon**

Although Scott had initially thought he might go out as soon as he was done grading the homework assignments, he found himself instead resting his head down on his desk and drifting off. His sleep was dreamless, but he awoke from it with a vague headache and a stronger crick in his neck. It was a quarter past four, and he found himself thinking some fresh air would do him good.

The moment he stepped out of his apartment building, however, he immediately felt eyes on him. When he looked around there was nobody there, and he wasn’t sure he wasn’t imagining it, but it didn’t feel right. Uneasily he wondered if Emma Frost had invisibility as a second mutation, or if she had a friend with that power. He wondered if it might be worth it to try to lose any unseen observers by getting on the subway, maybe to Central Park.

“I can’t live like this,” he muttered to himself. “And how much can I really run away? I’ve done enough of that for one lifetime recently.”

Still, the idea of Central Park appealed to him, if only because all the trees gathered together and shedding their leaves would now make him think of Jean, and at the moment he was in the mood to. Not that it was necessarily a good idea, he knew, but all the same, when he started walking, without his head quite giving the conscious command for it his feet went in the direction of the station. When he found himself there he gave in, and boarded the train for Manhattan. As he’d hoped, in the crowded car, the feeling of being watched dissipated.

Central Park was exactly as he’d hoped. He let his feet move on their own again once in, though he had a vague idea of maybe going to the fountain. But then he found himself standing at the entrance to the Ramble. He recalled a story Professor Xavier had told him, Jean, and Ororo once, when they’d still been fairly young, about how he and Erik had once met with another man they’d believed to be a mutant, and he had always refused to meet with them anywhere but in the Ramble. It was one of those stories where they’d only started to fully understand it much later in life.

Of course the place wasn’t like it was that afternoon. If the secret homosexual assignations that had once run rampant in the place ever still happened, Scott doubted it would be during the day, and secret meetings between superheroes, supervillains, or superanyones seemed highly unlikely as well. Still, he turned in, and began his trek amid the wild growth, taking his time to examine all the diverse kinds of the plant life cultivated for the pleasure of the more innocent parkgoers.

When he first heard the voices, about half an hour in, he didn’t think anything of it. But they seemed vaguely familiar, and as they grew louder, he suddenly realized with a shock that one of them was Emma Frost’s. He froze in place when he recognized it, his mind racing. Had she been controlling his mind the entire time, guiding him here? Was she really that powerful? She would’ve had to have been as powerful as the Professor had been for that.

In any case he was going to listen in on this conversation, and he was going to report it back to Ororo if he got back to his apartment with his memory of it intact. Unless this was all a big coincidence and they weren’t talking about anything important.

It wasn’t. When he got close enough to discern their words if he strained but not close enough to make it obvious he could hear them, he heard her companion, the golden-maned man she’d attended the circus with, finish, “…and talk with Lehnsherr again.”

“We don’t need him,” was her reply. “We don’t need any of this. I still don’t see how it’s even our problem.”

“You talk as if a problem is all it could be,” he laughed. “That’s not like you, Emma.”

“You think so, Harry? Unlike some of you, I have basic sense.”

“Don’t let Mr. Shaw hear you say that,” he said. The name  _Shaw_  was vaguely familiar to Scott; he thought it might have been connected to the photo he’d seen; Shaw might have been the other man with them at the circus.

But meanwhile she was continuing to speak, too loudly, obviously making sure he could hear her, “He thinks we can become the ones who can control them, I know that. If they weren’t the Sentinels, I might even think it a risk worth taking. Or if we really thought they were still going to kill _all_  mutants; then we might even have to join the X-Men and play the public heroes out of self-preservation. But the government will never go that far, not anymore, especially not now when it’s only a matter of weeks now before the first recipients of the Cure feel it start to wear off. But as it is, the Sentinels are too dangerous and too well controlled for anyone but a fool to try to wrest control away from their handlers. I was hoping you’d have the sense to see that.”

Had she really, Scott, thought, or had he just been the one she could lure here to stage this conversation with? That was obviously what she was doing here. Also, why was she going to this elaborate a setup, when she could’ve just visited him at the school and mind-whammied anyone who saw her or could have otherwise complicated whatever her plan was?

Also,  _the Cure was only temporary?_

Scott couldn’t let himself think about that last part yet; he wouldn’t hear another word of this conversation if he did. Fortunately in his moment of distraction he hadn’t missed much; Harry had spent some time laughing. “This really isn’t like you, Emma! Look, I came out here with you because I thought you were going to agree we shouldn’t trust Lehnsherr; they may say he’s not as idealist as he once was but I still don’t think he’d approve of our goals, and sooner or later he’d probably find them out, and once he tracked down that helmet of his you couldn’t do anything about it either.”

“Well I do agree with you about that,” she shrugged. “And if you want me to help you try to keep him from getting too involved, I’m all for that, if only because there seems to be nothing else we can do. Unless you think maybe Shaw doesn’t have his mind set on this?”

“Hey,” he said, “you’re the physic one. You should have a better idea on that than me.”

“He does, from what I can tell. Come on, we’ve probably stood here a little too long; we should keep walking.”

Walk they did, and Scott tried to follow them, but suddenly it became hard. He started feeling dizzy and distracted, and even found himself walking the other way without initially realizing he was doing so. Clearly she did not want him following.

He tried anyway for a few minutes, forcing himself to walk the right away, repeating  _it’s this way, it’s this way, it’s this way_  multiple times in his head whenever he started to feel the confusion set in. That he was able to think his own thoughts to the extent he did, he supposed, stood as proof positive Emma Frost was not as powerful as the Professor had been.

But she was powerful enough; it got harder to concentrate, and they were getting too far ahead, or he was convinced of that. Which was probably just her telling him that, but he wasn’t sure; when he forced himself to listen hard to his surroundings he still couldn’t hear a thing.

Finally he gave up. As far as he could tell she was not doing anything that would stop him from going home and emailing Ororo about this, so he might as well do that.

This trip home gave him time also to think about the fact that the Cure was apparently only temporary. She’d said the first recipients would feel it ware off within a few more weeks, and since she’d been talking about when the public found out, he assumed she meant the first people to receive the Cure in Alcatraz, rather than the first testings behind closed doors. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been injected after those people, but he didn’t think it had been a month. Soon it would wear off for him too.

Of course, he could just get himself injected again, he supposed. Unless for some reason that didn’t work; whether he could was something he supposed he would find out soon enough.

Except he wasn’t sure he wanted to. Things were different now, when he had a few months away from the world of mutants and X-Men and everything that had reminded him of Jean. Except he still hadn’t left her behind, given how much he was dreaming of her, but at least, somewhere in there, he’d nonetheless started to feel like he could dream about her at night but still live without her during the day, and not even be afraid that he was going to break at any moment. If he could hold her memory and still be able to function, he supposed his mutant power being around wouldn’t devastate him.

There was even the possibility, when it came to that, that he could go rejoin the X-Men. Though that he wasn’t sure he was ready to do. At the very least, he had his commitment to the school, and ought to teach the year out, for the sake of his students. He honestly had no idea how he’d feel the following summer anymore; perhaps he would take it into consideration then.

He half-expected to suddenly not be able to remember details when he sat down in front of his computer, but no, he remembered every word clearly, and wrote them all down without trouble. He then paused, knowing where her thoughts would go on hearing that the Cure was temporary, at least with regards to him.

After considering that, he wrote,  _I think if the Cure does indeed ware off I may not take it again, though I make no promises, and certainly I have no immediate plans to come back to you; I have new commitments I must honor. But if you need any help, and I’m the only one who can give it for any reason, you only have to contact me._


End file.
